Here is a one-minute audio from Radio Lab. It is worth the time to listen and hear the words and the tone. A transcript follows:

The whisper in human nature. The whisper is a point where we really speak intently to a single person we whisper. When we whisper, we whisper at funerals, we whisper in the presence of awesome things in nature. …. Its that reduced use of the voice, that drops down, that drops down until it only goes into the ear its intended for. Its Isiah’s call, he’s lying on his mat and he hears the call, that’s for me alone, that call is for me alone. That’s the sense that that experiment gives to me. The universe has been shouting, and shouting and shouting at us and we gather all of this scientific knowledge out of the shout, out of the clapping, out of the cheers. And now where we’re at in the 21st century is we are going down and saying what’s in the whisper. And those whispers go clear back to conception, clear back to birth. If we understand these whispers, we are very close to understanding gestation.

It is a revelatory moment. His words and passion resonate with me. So much of what it sought nowadays is ‘the smoking gun’ or ‘the low hanging fruit’ – all ways to describe shouting. But more frequently, the insightful treasure is hidden in the nuance, in the hint of correlation, in the whisper of conversation.

Did you hear is tone? Awe-struck, reverential, hardly containing his excitement. He so fully expresses the joy at being the recipient of the whisper. That sound, that level of engagement is no different than the difficult case well performed or a simple concern or need skillfully addressed.

One of the advantages of white space, the space between words or acts, the idle moments of time is that it allows the whisper to be heard. Do you hear the whispers or are they all drowned out by shouts?